Callaaites don't have family names. Like modern Icelanders, their surnames are derived from a parent's given name. The difference is that, for the most part, Icelandic and old Scandinavian names were patronymics, while Callaaite names were matronymics. So Warrior's navigator in Returning, Lieutenant Marina Fehmadaatin, could equally be styled in English as Marina, Fehma's Daughter.
Marina was a 19-year-old sub lieutenant, only recently graduated from the Imperial Naval College, when she volunteered to join the starship Warrior as navigating officer. When the ship returned to earth 15 years later (by ship time, or 86,985 years in real time), she was 34, and had been a lieutenant for several years.
A beautiful, blue-eyed blond, there was something about Marina that tended to intimidate modern men. Even 2126 men who had never heard of Callaa, and had no idea that for almost a thousand years its women had cultivated a reputation as the most deadly warriors in the pre-Imperial world. Even unarmed, Marina was more dangerous than most people would be with a gun.
Just as the destruction of Arzucalda by Earth's deorbited second moon is suggested as a possible source for the Atlantis legends, so Callaa seems a possible source for later Amazon stories.
For all that, Marina wasn't particularly ferocious in ordinary life. When you're not even a little intimidated by anyone, you can put up with a lot more from them. Chihuahuas are afraid of everything and tend to fight back even when they're not really in danger. Great Danes fear very little, and it usually takes a lot to provoke them, but if you do the results can be devastating.
Marina is a widow, because her husband remained at home when Warrior took off into space. He died sometime during the first jump, when the ship travelled some 200 light years. In the process, the people aboard the ship aged a few seconds, while the universe aged 200 years.
One of the more unique things about Returning is this concept of speed-of-light travel. Warrior, and the other two ships of her class, travel at about .9999 light speed when they're in jumpspace. Outside the temporal bubble where the ship is travelling, time continues normally.
This has an odd effect when the ship interacts with colonial worlds. With each visit, Warrior becomes more archaic, her systems more ancient, her technology more out of date. When Surgeon Commander Vordik joins the ship during a call on his native New Barzak, the medical technology he brings with him is literally millennia more advanced than what the ship started out with only, to her crew, a decade earlier. Her return to Earth is one of the few times Warrior encounters a human civilisation less advanced than her own.
Of course, other than Earth, any human civilisation Warrior encounters is descended from colonists she brought to that planet centuries before. So, while Warrior is travelling forward in time in prodigious leaps, those colonies continue to advance scientifically and technologically at the usual rate, rapidly putting them well ahead of their parent culture as represented by the starship's crew.
I've had a lot of time to think about the Gehunite civilisation. As the date on the map indicates, I first came up with the culture in the mid-1970s, for an ultimately never published novel called Alura. If I still had it, I'd publish it now, but the manuscript was lost years ago. It's possible that the California publisher that wanted to do it way back then kept a copy, but they've been out of business for many years now, and I can't remember the publisher's name.
Alura was swords and sorcery. Returning is science fiction. They're connected by the Gehunite Empire, which starts as a world where magic exists and ends as a world where science has taken over. The span between the two novels is roughly 525 years of Gehunite history. Long enough for the magic to fade away, and humanity to go from riding animals to exploring deep space.
You'll find Returning available at Amazon.com, in both Kindle and trade paperback editions. Be one of those people who gets interested early, so you can feel superior to the lazy chaps who waited until the movie to notice there was a book.
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